Intrigue!

There is a magazine missing from the tea room. The sanctity of the 'preparation area' has been violated and even now furtive looks are breaking out on all sides as distrust billows out upon the academic waters like flower petals on the surface of a pond in Spring. Of course most of that is normal for a Wednesday, excepting the disappearance.

The magazine in question, which title I have forgotten, featured a story on a footballer, whose name I have also forgotten. The owner, a manic football fan, mutters about this being the second time it has happened. It's all very suspicious. Chocolates have been offered as a reward, but will chocolates be enough? Especially when we consider the suspects?

But who are the suspects?

-- The faculty: A bunch of dissolute rogues with little better to do than chatter about Google Now, felines in high heels and commit petty larcenies. They might teach or commit research (eat biscuits) in the intermittent interregna, fighting through the brain altering effects of long term exposure to 'hospital yellow' paint. Suspicion always falls on The Badger first, but we must be even-handed.

-- The postgraduates, a.k.a. 'Those who aspire to the faculty': Their aspiration alone renders these lunatics as suspect beyond all belief, but the destitution of higher study and pressures of fantasy football have shattered many minds before and will shatter many more hence. The magazine owner is watching them fiercely from her place deep amongst them.

-- The undergraduates, a.k.a. 'The day players': They dare not enter the tearoom, but could exam pressures and the promise of swag (old newspapers, icky sponges, a bottle of milk) put them in the path of temptation? Do any of them have the imagination?

-- Everyone else: The institute director (long suspected of vegetable fraud), cleaners and porters (escaped cheese smugglers), administrative staff (closet closet lovers), librarians (hedge fanciers), and anyone else who might wander in.

Be warned, possible magazine purloiners, we are watching. And we have chocolates.

O.